The whole internet is talking about what college professors were talking about in meetings all year long: now that ChatGPT and its denizens are ubiquitous, it’s clear that many, many students are using generative AI to complete some or all of their written assignments and to cheat on tests and quizzes.

Threads on X and my Facebook feed of fellow academics are full of alternately thoughtful and outraged discussion of why the “kids these days” should know they are “only cheating themselves,” that “university coursework has been bullshit for decades,” and the always helpful advice to, “make them do everything by hand.”

So, I want to look at each of these three responses, and then pose an attempt to answer the millennia-old question, “Why write?” The answer to that question is not obvious, and by even posing the question, I’ve “generated” my next project: examining how we, as a culture, don’t really have a clue what writing (and its mother, language) is. But that will be a substack for another day.

Who are we so concerned about?

First, we have to establish that “students” in these discussions refers only to members of Gen Z. I don’t get the sense that professors and all of the helpful cultural commentators on the internet are concerned about older people using generative AI to write their shopping lists or provide quick content for a work memo. The “olds” pretty readily accept that in our wisdom we know the ethical and practical line for using these tools. As a group, we recognize that work memos are a bullshit art form par excellence and there’s something satisfying about letting a computer generate words that will never be read by any human. No, the outrage is bound up in our collective fear that we are failing in our duty to the nation’s children in a new and profoundly disturbing way. We are in a panic because now the evidence is coming in: our children do not see education (what we have been calling education) as beneficial, and they see no problem gaming the systems we have relied on for at least forty years to educate students to enter the white collar professions. We believe we owe children an education (see my first piece in the series on “What We Owe Children”) and yet the children—most of the children— are rejecting the product.

They’re only cheating themselves

I really like this argument, rooted as it is in our collective Puritan work ethic and impulse toward militaristic discipline of mind and body. When we employ this argument, we want to compel the cheater to imagine a future moment in time when they will finally be tested (whether that is a test of their knowledge, their skills, or their physical stamina). We are making a shame-based appeal that requires the listener to imagine a future self, to identify with the kind of shame we would feel if “caught out” not knowing something or being able to do something that a person of our age and socio-economic and professional status should be able to do, and therefore choose the more difficult path now in order to ensure a future self will not experience that shame. People who make this argument do not remember being twenty years old nor do they know many twenty-year olds. Twenty-year olds have trouble imagining how they will both eat dinner, complete their homework, and party at the club in a single night. Their time horizon is astonishingly short which is why the military-industrial complex has been able to use them as cannon fodder so reliably for decades.

University coursework is (and has been for a long time) total bullshit

I’ll use a personal story to tease out what I think is at work in this argument. First, in a sophomore English literature class, the professor required the students to come to her house to watch a film adaptation of one of the books we were reading three separate times in the semester. On one of these evenings, I had a conflicting event—maybe a play rehearsal or perhaps I had a scheduled work shift at the student union. I told the professor I would not be attending, for this specific reason. I made the decision not to attend this session because the film was Sense and Sensibility, which I owned on VHS and had already watched approximately forty-five times with my Austen-loving father. The professor informed me that I wouldn’t be able to write the response paper, which was 10% of my grade. I said that I believed I would be able to generate a 1-2 page paper, since I had the film basically memorized. She then informed me that I could not do this, because attendance at the event was actually the point of the assignment, and the response paper was a final step in the whole experience. Because I judged the paper itself to be “bullshit",” and because I did not value the socializing and movie discussion more than whatever it was I would be doing instead, I was comfortable with taking that hit to my grade (and bless this professor, she was true to her word). I moved on with my life and earned a Ph.D. in Literature.

What was happening here? First, I was never “the good student.” I was not identified as “gifted and talented” in elementary school, likely because puzzles bored me. I excelled in AP Physics, but found Chemistry so mind-numbingly dull and was so disengaged that the teacher didn't even learn my name. I was never the student motivated by the chimera of “perfect” grades. My locker was a mess, my backpack was worse, and I received a D- on my first high school research paper because I wrote it the night before it was due, and it was terrible.

Looking back twenty years from the vantage of being a college professor, I cannot imagine what was so important that I was willing to throw away a full letter grade. But I don’t need to imagine anything, and I do not need to justify the decision, to myself or anyone else. My professor did exactly the right thing—she had designed an experience that included group camaraderie and hospitality that was of value to her course. I judged the exigencies and I made my choice. She enforced the consequences of my actions. This professor and I had and still have a great relationship. I directed Kate Hamill’s Sense and Sensibility fifteen years after this event, and shared my love of the novel with a cast of fourteen actors.

If an eighteen to twenty-two year old judges an assignment to be bullshit—by which I mean not worth their time—that is up to them. Professors should enforce their syllabuses. But so-called adults agreeing with the college student is far more worrying. I see in this argument the continuation of our national schizophrenia toward higher education: we will pay exorbitant sums of money for it, indenturing ourselves and our children to loan companies for decades to attain it, while we deride it publicly and claim that it is only a “hoop to jump through” and “endless bullshit assignments that have no connection to the real world.” Our profound hatred for the educational system long predates the advent of generative AI, and is the much more pressing spiritual concern.

Make Them Do Everything By Hand

My favorite response to the problems created by AI has to be: “Make the students do all their work by hand!”

I love this response. It has all of the denture-adjusting garbled passion of “back in my day, we were lucky to have words!”

Last week’s Wall Street Journal featured an astonished article on the return of the “blue book,” written for the aging millennials, Xers, and boomers who loathed them. Ben Cohen dramatically introduces this ancient tool called back into service to fight the AI Dragon with his own literary flourishes:

You’ve probably used it. You might even dread it.

It’s called a blue book.

The mere thought of that exam booklet with a blue cover and blank pages is enough to make generations of college kids clam up—and make their hands cramp up.

Ah, there it is. The hand cramp. The tormenting pain of education. The body keeps the score of mind-numbing rote lessons in our tendons and ligaments, all of which are now flaring up in sympathetic memory of our past selves’ trauma. Like Harry Potter, we loathed the endless writing to prove our submission to the educational machine. Like Harry Potter, we never agreed with what we had to write. Our hands might have dragged across the blue book pages, our minds engaged in regurgitating half-digested facts, but our spirits remained free.1

Somehow, whenever I hear this solution, I hear behind it the authoritarian parent, sighing “this hurts me more than it hurts you,” as he takes off the belt of educational discipline. “We have lovely technology we invented to ease the pain of educational resistance, but you miserable lot could not be trusted in the technocratic Eden we constructed. You ate the ChatGPT Apple. Back to the wilderness of pen and paper for you.” Pencil purgatory for all. You must earn your keyboard, miserable curs.

At least, that’s what I fear the students will hear in this solution. They look at us elder Millenials grumbling while gumming our avocado toast and sipping our lukewarm matcha lattes, convinced that all we’re raging about is that these damn Gen Z students will not just do what we did and support the American economy with their blind deference to its initiation ceremonies. And so now we have to lug their Blue Book exams back to our offices to grade their essays, if we can even read what they’re calling “handwriting” these days.

So Why Write?

But…I actually like my students. I’m not the elder millennial ogre I fear they think that I am. I want them to learn things, because I want them to be able to do things with that education. Once again, I’m becoming convinced that I’m the problem, and I inherited a messy system that had long divided product (education) from process (coursework) by using writing assignments to accomplish something other than what writing is for.

I have come to the conclusion after eighteen months of reading ChatGPT’s answers to my homework assignments that unless I have a defensible, cogent reason for why my students should write something, then I should not assign writing.

The Counterfeit Reasons

Here are two reasons I was told to assign lots of weekly writing by a senior faculty member when I arrived on the tenure-track:

• We are known for assigning a lot of writing.

• You need to give them lots of small opportunities to earn grades as “check-ins” to make sure you’re finding out early who may be struggling with the material.

I complied (“I must not tell lies”), but I never thought these were good reasons to have 15 small assignments. I did not want to assign all of this writing (ask my students how often I forget to give out assignments, quizzes, even whole papers). They do not want to complete this writing. I do not want to read what they wrote, because these small assignments and the responses they generate often are so rote a monkey could type them (a monkey could certainly copy and paste the prompt into ChatGPT).

To the first reason: we may be known for assigning a lot of writing, but we also could be known for assigning formal speeches, or interpretive dance, or poster presentations. We could be known for Socratic discussion or debate or juggling bowling pins. This appeal to tradition especially fails because the tradition itself has no common warm feelings attached to it and produces nothing of lasting worth. When we as a culture think of university writing, our emotional tie evokes feelings of shame, disgust, and trauma (see above) so much more often than it produces feelings of pride or accomplishment. We must pay attention to these effects; the AI-generated writing is only the latest warning signal. Something has gone seriously wrong over decades to create an educational landscape that associates writing with control, submission, and punishment.

Let’s examine the second reason: because one or two people may not be doing their assigned reading/attending class, everyone must do extra homework to make sure we discover who these slackers are early in the semester. The logic here strikes me as something of a false dilemma: either everyone writes often or some students will be “left behind.” A decade of experience has proven the falseness of this logic. Not only are some students “left behind” no matter how often and early I provide “check-ins,” the weekly, bullshit writing has a negative effect on the 95% who dutifully complete it. At best it robs them of time that is rightfully theirs for thinking, dreaming, or partying at the club. At worst, it poisons their relationship with their professors, who become grade token machines.

What happens for the struggling student? I assign weekly writing. The struggling student does not complete the weekly writing. I submit multiple academic alerts for the student, hold meetings with the student, come up with “makeup” plans, and usually counsel the student to withdraw from the class. I have 2-3 of these students each semester (about 5-10% of the whole group). So, that is forty of these cases in ten years. Out of these forty cases, I’ve had maybe…ten use this system of early detection to turn around chronic procrastination/anxiety/illness-induced course failure.

Now that ChatGPT has entered the conversation, several of these students have become the ones who turn in extensive, floridly written assignments. Despite never speaking up in class, their homework uses vocabulary that I have never once in my 20 years of teaching seen college students use: “demure,” “denote,” “delves,” and “distills.”2 It strikes me that we only began assigning writing as a proxy for minimal progress through the course when writing became digital, and therefore cheap. Professors were the first ones to “flood the market” with assignments, cheaply assigned and cheaply graded. (Complete? Check mark!) Yet we wonder that the market has responded to our cheap, bullshit assignments with even cheaper dupes. Meanwhile, the struggling students still struggle and their relationship to writing has become even more fraught at the cultural, institutional, classroom, and personal level.

Really, Why write?

I ponder the question from what feels like the brink of something new, or the precipice of something terrible. It feels like it’s time to completely reimagine college level teaching—especially where writing fits into it.

As I’ve mulled over the question for the last two weeks (how long this essay has taken to write), I have come up with four reasons why we write. They are:

1. To show mastery

2. To share an idea or knowledge

3. To discover what you actually think

4. To discover what something is

Most college-level writing exists to accomplish the first two goals. Exam essays show mastery. Research papers/presentations have the potential both to demonstrate mastery and communicate new ideas/knowledge. When writing in these modes, the writing itself recedes to make thought apparent. I think most of our problems with writing as a culture exist because we think that the writing is the end, instead of the thought communicated through it. For Reason #1 and #2, we write to accomplish the goals of education. The students must get the thoughts out of their heads for us to know what is in there.

Reasons #3 and #4

I recently had a student submit a paper for my class on the “naughty bits” in Shakespeare’s dramas—a satire of the form of scholarly writing itself and of the current political moment in the United States culture wars, especially in Florida. The paper was well-written, but as a satire of scholarly research papers, I did not think it quite worked, and it definitely did not meet the assignment prompt. I had wanted to assess breadth and depth of research. Even though the paper would not score highly on a research paper rubric, it did not mean that the writing of it was a bullshit exercise. By seeing even only in glimpses my student’s thoughts on the subject, I could begin to converse with what he was trying to say (#3). And because he attempted—took the risk—of writing it in the satirical form, I could speak to the whole exercise with my own thoughts on what this thing was trying to be (#4). My biggest note was, “I think this is a play, not a paper.” I told him he should transform it into a play and submit it to the Orlando Fringe Festival, which he did. Not only did it become exactly what I thought it could be, so many others agreed. The satire of Florida politics sang with biting wit as the “Shakespeare Scholar” drily lectured us on the “naughty bits” in the Bard’s plays which were acted out by a deft troupe of Players, drowned out by the ridiculous objections of staged MAGA politicians and activists. I laughed so hard I cried, it was a smash hit and went on to win Patron’s Pick in its first run.

A different image from Harry Potter comes to mind here—the Pensieve, a silver basin in which a wizard can deposit memories the better to examine them. Writing is a basin, whether hand written or digital, in which we can discover ideas we did not know we had or what our project actually is. Writing is the basin in which those ideas can be shared with many other people.

In Conclusion

While we wring our hands over AI-use in higher education, I must report to you that almost none of my students use it for their homework and papers. They feel viscerally that it would cheat them, that they would only be regurgitating other regurgitations. Generative-AI as a writing tool is not a basin so much as it is a massive puke bowl. Rather than the imagined shame we think they should feel about what they might do, most of Gen Z feels disgust at what we—the adults—have actually created.

When I consider the mess we have inherited, I figure there is nothing to do but clean out the bowl. There’s something satisfyingly Buddhist about cleaning the little bowl I have been given and starting again. I’ll probably have the students do all writing in class, by hand, but perhaps without the overtones of compulsion and punishment so rampant in our public discourse. Rather, like a friend and fellow pilgrim through academe, Dolores G. Morris, I’ll try again, perhaps with a “scaffolded term paper,” as she outlines in her excellent Substack, found here. And no matter what happens, I’ll always have Samuel Beckett’s comforting mantra for those who were never deemed gifted: “fail again, fail better.”

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